Relative Strangers Read online

  Life really began for Muriel when she was aged sixty. Robert and June had decided that Granny McKay, then eighty years of age, should enjoy her twilight years in the Oaks nursing home. Muriel had used her savings to buy a house close to the hospital. Ironically, two years after moving, the hospital trust had decided to computerise the records department and had taken the opportunity to offer Muriel early retirement.

  The first time that Muriel opened her new front door to find Les on her doorstep, neither of them had been able to speak for a full minute. He had hovered, hesitating, on the step, his thinning hair blown around by a stiff breeze. It was late afternoon. Muriel had been preparing her evening meal, which she always ate rather early; a throw-back from her days looking after her mother, who had kept early hours. She was wearing a flowery apron and had floury hands from the potato cake she was mixing. She held them up and out rather awkwardly, so that they didn’t touch anything. The sight of him on her threshold was a shock; she felt cold and warm at the same time, and her mind half formed questions and offered unsatisfactory answers to account for it. He was as thin and wiry as she recalled him, not a tall man, but with disproportionately large hands, which he toyed with restlessly in a manner which had always been habitual with him. He was smartly dressed, in a shirt and tie and a Harris Tweed jacket. Later she was to discover that he had dressed carefully for his visit, had planned it and purposed it as soon as he had discovered her address. This was no impulse thing; he had waited, he said, thirty five years to undo the wrong he had done. Later, Muriel was to berate him gently for not giving her an opportunity to prepare herself too.

  ‘I could have had my hair done,’ she said.

  But for those moments there were no words between them. She took him in with her eyes, noted how time had greyed his eyebrows and beetled them, veined his cheek and dulled the intensity of his eyes. His teeth had yellowed and his ear lobes had lengthened. He was no longer a vital young man, but a seasoned one, mellower; the scent of Old Spice had been superseded by Old Holborn. But the set of his jaw and his expression was identical, in spite of the years, to the way he had looked thirty-five years before, standing on another doorstep, just after he had told her that she must release him from their engagement and cancel their wedding plans because he had discovered that he must marry her sister instead. As she had stood there, struggling to understand the news, she had sensed, rather than seen or heard, the triumphant presence of her betrayer in the hall behind her. June, her seventeen year old sister, had given him what, in three years of courting, she had not. She had tried to hold his eyes but they had slipped away from her. But now, he did not look away. His eye was steady. His look held no expectation at all. She might shout, she might cry, she might hit out at him, she might embrace him; whatever it was, he would take it. His eyes did not flinch but his hands fluttered; it was the only sign which betrayed his quailing nerve.

  His visits became regular. She heard all the family news from him. Simon’s return from the wilderness, Robert’s stroke and subsequent retirement, Elliot’s assumption of the chairmanship of the company, April’s illness and death, Heather and Jude’s failure to have a baby, and, latterly, the plans for the family holiday and June’s fury at being excluded. He told her it all week by week as though it was the unfolding story of a soap opera available to him on some obscure cable or satellite network, but not to her. Elliot he portrayed as a nasty, avaricious man who had virtually wrested the company from Robert against his will. Ruth was described as a leftie radical feminist with poor parenting skills and no domestic ones, who nevertheless contended single-handedly at school against uneducable drug-taking thugs. Simon, he led Muriel to believe, was a heroic figure, fighting valiantly against bereavement, bringing up single-handedly his three orphaned children and carving out for himself a career in some fiendishly complicated world of high-tech new-fangled whatsits. Belinda she longed to know; from what Les said, she seemed a homely and kind-hearted sort, although efficient and smart. Only of Heather and Jude did she gain direct information, from the pages of Hello magazine, where they could regularly be seen attending galas and award ceremonies. Muriel hungered to hear of their doings, even though, through Les’ eyes, they did all seem very strange.

  Les taught her to drive; they went out in a little car he helped her to buy, long drives in the countryside and to the coast. On one of these outings he took her to an animal refuge where she chose Roger, a malodorous, mangy mongrel. He had nothing at all to recommend him; was under-socialized, which resulted in him being rather snappish and nervous with strangers, given to giddiness. He was unremarkable to look at and suffered from appalling halitosis. But he had been at the refuge for three years without attracting an owner, and would, the refuge manager thought, make a loyal and loving pet for the right owner. Muriel chose him because he reminded her so much of herself. (‘You haven’t got bad breath,’ Les said, chivalrously.) Les especially wanted her to have a dog. ‘I don’t like to think of you being alone,’ he said. It was just one more indication of his care and concern for her, and summed up his loving nature. Roger settled in to her little home immediately, choosing the second best chair for his day bed and the sheepskin bedroom rug as his night one. He needed only a short walk each day, as he was rather arthritic, and was happy to sit in the sunshine of the garden or by the fire, wherever Muriel herself was to be found.

  On Wednesdays Muriel would leave Roger behind and take the two buses to the Oaks to sit beside her mother, hearing her imperfect repetition of the news she had already heard from Les, sifting out the vague approximation to the facts from the ridiculous assertions which equally made up her mother’s world: (‘Our June says she’ll take me to Turkey one day. I wish you’d bring me some new bras. I saw some lovely ones the other day, in the butchers,’) restraining herself from correcting the details; (Torquay, Les had said, not Turkey), wondering if she was sitting in the very chair he had occupied the previous Saturday.

  On Fridays he would come and take her shopping, while June helped with the wages at the depot. They would saunter round the supermarket like a married couple, putting items into their trolley as though they would spend the weekend cooking and eating them together. On Monday evenings he would take her out to the pictures of for a meal while June played bridge at the golf club. Muriel never asked Les how he explained his absences, how he accounted to June for the times spent with her. But Les never sneaked or dissembled. He walked close beside her, took her arm openly, never looked over his shoulder. They both behaved as though June did not exist. Thus there was need neither for guilt, nor for choice.

  In the bedroom he was as tender and ardent as a boy, delighted by her. To Muriel’s astonishment, decades of unexpended sexual pleasures gushed forth from her at his touch, and drowned them both. She loved him with the intensity and abandonment of a girl in first love, indeed in many ways she had never grown up, but had waited in a kind of stasis, like a fairy-tale heroine, slumbering on the doorstep until her prince should come and awaken her.

  On one occasion only did she meet Les while June was present. Granny McKay had celebrated a birthday and the Oaks had thrown a small party in her honour. Muriel had gone of course, as had June and Les, Robert and Mary, and Sandra, with her boyfriend Kevin. Muriel had immediately been able to understand Les’ concern about his daughter’s choice of young man: he had loitered on the fringes of the family gathering offering nothing in the way of conversation or assistance, but spent the entire afternoon staring into space. From what she could tell Kevin was entirely unsuitable; uncommunicative, insolvent, from a disreputable family which had had more than its fair share of brushes with the police. June had laughed unnecessarily all afternoon, petting her mother and talking loudly about Sandra, who was, for all Muriel could see, an unremarkable girl, rather gauche and not especially pretty. Sandra was not the child who had caused the hasty marriage of June and Les; that baby had been lost only weeks after the quiet ceremony, if indeed, Muriel speculated, it had ever existed at all.
Muriel felt nothing for Sandra, even though she was Les’ flesh and blood, other than a vague sadness. June was portly, splendidly dressed and heavily made up. Muriel thought that her sister was impossibly brassy and loud. Les, she was surprised to see, kept himself aloof from the proceedings, passing tea cups when commanded to do so, agreeing with June when called upon, as he frequently was, but offering no conversation otherwise, apart from the briefest comment about football passed to Robert. But when it was time to go home and they had stood together in the overpowering heat of the entrance vestibule buttoning coats and fastening scarves, Les had shaken Muriel’s hand very warmly and kissed her boldly on the cheek before moving on to do likewise to Mary and June’s torrent of inconsequential conversation had stumbled as she observed it.

  Muriel’s telephone rung very late on Friday evening. For the telephone to ring at all was a shock; it rarely did, and Muriel tended to think of it as a herald of bad news. She would answer it with a mixture of extreme caution and excessive wonderment, as though she could not conceive that the call could be anything to do with her and that, if it was, it was bound to be unwelcome. But for it to ring at such a late hour could only be, she thought, a harbinger of doom and she immediately thought of her mother at the Oaks.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was Les, speaking in a low voice, calling to tell her that he probably would not be able to see her on Monday. She had been excessively lonely that day, without him. Now she would not see him on Monday either. Muriel’s heart sank.

  ‘Before I knew what was happening, I was driving Robert and Mary up here. June’s got it into her head that we’re staying all week,’ he said gloomily.

  Muriel toyed with the belt of her dressing gown. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so you’re all up there together, then.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Les nodded, ‘and, what’s worse, I think she’s got something up her sleeve for tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Les sounded glum. ‘Some carry-on. There’s more, but I can’t tell you now.’

  ‘I understand,’ Muriel sighed. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘I’d phone the Oaks tomorrow and weigh things up, if I were you,’ Les said, before hanging up.

  Muriel hesitated at the bottom of her stairs in the moonlit hall. Roger regarded her with concern from the top. She considered making a cup of Ovaltine to take upstairs with her. She could drink it while she finished the last three or four chapters of the book she was reading, a Mills and Boon romance. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for herself, alone of all the family excluded from the wonderful McKay holiday. She knew it was a bad habit but she indulged the complaint once more, that in spite of having done so very well for themselves, no one in the whole family ever thought to throw a crumb to their poor maiden aunt. She didn’t know why she wasn’t frequently called upon for baby-sitting, or included in family trips and treats. Even with Les’ companionship she was so often alone, and in the watches of the night she would frequently worry about dying suddenly without a hand to grasp in extremis, and being found decomposing days later by strangers.

  June, of course, was the cause of all her pain and hardship. From her very arrival she had disturbed Muriel’s happiness. Aged only six she had been expected to mind her baby sister, begin helping with the washing and cleaning and was banished from the embraces of her parents. From her point of view, June had stolen Muriel’s place as cherished baby of the family and later she had taken also, in the cruellest way, her fiancé, her unborn family, her whole future. And now she would keep Les to herself for the whole week and deny Muriel even a few hours of companionship and love. It seemed like the last straw, and as Muriel lay sleepless in her lonely bed, she burned with unhappy self-pity.

  When Les got back to their room, June was snoring loudly, and taking up the whole of the double bed. Where ever he lay in the bed now he would not be able to avoid touching her, and he couldn’t bear that. He left the room with a heavy sigh in search of an unoccupied bed.

  Ruth – A memoir from 1972

  On the morning of Ruth’s eighth birthday she woke up early. In the room she shared with Belinda spring morning light was already filtering through the pink curtains made by her mother. Ruth hadn’t wanted pink. She hated pink. But pink was for girls and this was the girls’ room. They had to share it, now that the new baby was in the little room, the room that had been Ruth’s, before she came. This shared room was not the biggest room. Mummy and Daddy had that, and Simon had the next biggest, the exciting room, built into the loft, even though he was the smallest – next to smallest – but he was the boy, so he had to have a big room. It wasn’t fair.

  In the bed across the room Belinda wasn’t stirring but Ruth knew that she mustn’t get up, yet. On a birthday, the birthday person had to get up last and go down to breakfast where everyone would be waiting and there would be parcels. But somebody was awake, she could hear movement in the bathroom next door; swishing water and the funny chunnering noise her father made when he washed his face before he soaped it with the little brush and shaved his chin. Ruth itched to get up, to see if he had changed his mind. Today, as well as being her birthday, was Saturday. On Saturdays Daddy went to the yard and tinkered with the lorries and sorted out the pink delivery notes, and, with painstaking slowness, his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, wrote out the invoices. On the rare occasions when she had been taken (under protest, he didn’t want to, really, but he had done it two or three times when the baby in her tummy had made Mummy tired) she had thrilled at the size of the enormous vehicles parked like sleeping dragons in an orderly row, sniffed in their hot, oily smell, loved scrambling up into the cabs to wriggle on the slippery vinyl seats and reach her hands out to the solid wheel. The cabs were a treasure trove of half packets of sweeties and dog-eared maps and they smelled of sweat and chips and cigarettes and grease and Daddy. Her Daddy had a swivelling chair in his office and there were washed out beans tins with paper clips and rubber bands and pens in them and mugs with cold, scummy tea and shelves thick with dust. It was all a marvellous, grubby, exciting, grown-up shambles and she had begged to be taken there today, as her birthday treat. But Daddy had said no.

  Instead there was to be a party. Ten little girls from her class at school; games, a birthday tea. Ten little girls plus Ruth and Belinda. And Simon - the only boy.

  On the back of the bedroom door, their party dresses hung waiting. Both pink (inevitably). Belinda’s was made of netting, with a full skirt which stood out stiff over a petticoat. It had little pearls sewn onto the bodice and puffed sleeves and its neck was edged in pink satin ribbon. It was completely wrong for a twelve year old but Belinda liked it and had helped her mother sew on the pearls. It made Belinda, who was chubby anyway, look like blob of pink bubble gum. Not that the McKay girls were allowed to chew gum; it was common. Ruth’s dress was made of clingy, slippery sateen, a slightly paler shade of pink. It had a straight skirt to the knee and a round neck with a large, fussy Peter Pan collar which had given Mummy no end of trouble on the machine, and three-quarter length sleeves and a wide satin ribbon at the waist which tied in an enormous bow at the back. It made Ruth, who was skinny, look like a stick of rock. Their white knee-length socks and shiny patent leather shoes lay ready. The only item of clothing which would be left to their own choice would be which hair-band they might wear. The baby would be trussed up in layers of pink knitted woollies and look like a little pink dolly-mixture. Simon would wear shorts and a shirt, and perhaps, if he could be persuaded to keep it on, his gingham bow tie. He would be the only one of them spared the indignity of being made to look like an item of confectionery.

  The pink of the dresses melded into the pink of the room. Anaglypta wallpaper painted pink, pink carpet, pink light shade with a pink bulb, pink candlewick bed-spreads and flannelette sheets, pink curtains; it was like being trapped inside a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Lotion.

  From the bathroom Ruth heard the click of the toilet lid being raised and a sort
of sigh. Then Daddy blew his nose, like a trumpet. Then there was quiet. Presently the toilet roll holder rattled before the chain was pulled. Water swished again then the door opened and Daddy went back into the bedroom. Ruth heard low voices exchange a sentence or two and she began to wriggle with impatience between the sheets. Even now it was possible that Daddy might change his mind, put his head round the door and say to her, ‘Alright, then. Get up quick and you can come.’ She began, in her mind, to plot out how quickly she could get up and dressed, where her playing-out trousers and cotton shirt would be; located, in her mind’s eye, her old shoes (they would be on the rack in the back porch); planned to grab an apple and a banana from the fruit bowl so that she would not get hungry and make a nuisance of herself by needing food. She didn’t care about the ten little girls or the games or the tea; it could all take place without her. She would rather go to the yard. But then she heard her Daddy’s footsteps as they hurried down the stairs, the fumble as he put his boots on and the front door open and close. He had gone. Gone without her. Gone before the birthday breakfast and the presents, gone without even saying Happy Birthday.